Margarita Howard built contractor HX5 on a specific hiring premise: find people who have already worked inside NASA or the Department of Defense. Not adjacent to it. Not in analogous commercial roles. Inside it.
“Experience in their respective fields, while supporting these agencies’ respective programs and missions, is very different from experience gained from working in the commercial world,” Howard, HX5’s founder and CEO, said.
For a company providing embedded technical support across research and development, engineering, and mission operations at over 70 government locations, that distinction carries real weight. A hire who already knows DoD procurement culture and security protocols is ready to contribute on day one. One who doesn’t may take the better part of a year to get there, assuming they clear the security process at all.
So it came as something of a surprise, even to Howard, when universities became one of HX5’s more productive partnerships.
“One of our most valuable partnerships, that we just did not know about or expect such wonderful results to come about, has been with academic institutions,” she said. “Collaborating with universities on research initiatives has been very eye-opening and rewarding.”
A Preference Rooted in Practice
HX5’s work demands what Howard has called “purple unicorns.” These are professionals with rare combinations of advanced STEM credentials, active security clearances, and direct program experience at a defense or space agency.
That combination is genuinely scarce. The defense industry’s workforce remains far below its Cold War-era scale: The National Defense Industry Association’s Vital Signs 2025 report found that the sector had 3 million workers in 1985 and 1.1 million by 2021. The same report also noted that 53% of respondents say it is somewhat difficult or very difficult to find STEM workers, and 53% identify competition with the commercial sector as a top barrier to filling vacancies.
Security clearances compound the problem. The authorization process for new employees can stretch a year or longer. For contractors operating on active government programs, a year-long onboarding gap is operationally disruptive. It’s one reason experienced hires, those who arrive with clearances already in place, command such a premium.
HX5’s retention record reflects how seriously the company takes that calculus. Many employees have remained with the firm for a decade or more, with some approaching 15 years of tenure. Long-tenured staff on sensitive programs represent institutional knowledge that cannot be easily replaced or rapidly reconstructed.
When the Experienced Pool Runs Short
But the math eventually catches up with any firm that relies exclusively on experienced hires. The population of cleared, mission-experienced STEM professionals is finite. Commercial tech companies offer compensation packages and career flexibility that defense contractors can’t always match. And as experienced professionals age out of the workforce, the pool contracts further.
The Semiconductor Industry Association projects a deficit of approximately 1.4 million technicians, computer scientists, and engineers in the United States by 2030. That number cuts across industries, but defense contractors feel it acutely because their requirements layer on clearance and mission-experience prerequisites that filter out a substantial share of otherwise-qualified candidates.
For Margarita Howard, that pressure created an opening for a different kind of institutional relationship.
Two Returns on One Partnership
University collaborations offer companies like HX5 two distinct returns. The first is technology access. Research partnerships with academic institutions give the company early visibility into emerging technologies — AI applications, new engineering methodologies, advanced materials — before they reach mainstream adoption in the defense sector. Faculty and graduate students bring current research rather than established practice. That exposure to innovation has value independent of any hiring outcome.
The second return is the talent pipeline itself. Graduate students and faculty who work with HX5 on research initiatives become candidates who arrive with some understanding of the company’s work, its government client environment, and its technical standards. They are not experienced hires in the traditional sense, but they are not cold candidates either. The relationship compresses the evaluation process and, in some cases, creates a path to short-term project contributions before a formal hire is made.
“Collaborating with the universities on research initiatives has helped us stay ahead of the emerging technologies, and also foster a pipeline of talented graduates that may come to work for us or contribute on a short-term basis,” Howard said.
A graduate student who contributes on a research project, then expresses interest in full-time work, enters HX5’s hiring process with demonstrated technical performance.
What the Broader Industry Is Building
HX5’s approach sits inside a wider push to formalize the defense-academia connection. In 2024, the DoD renewed its Defense STEM Education Consortium as a 10-year, $190 million cooperative agreement managed by RTI International. The consortium, which served more than 208,000 students and nearly 9,000 educators in its first three years, aims to build a durable pipeline of STEM talent into defense careers.
At the institutional level, programs like the University of Florida’s FINS Talent Pipeline program now pre-screens engineering undergraduates for national security employment, providing clearance-readiness preparation and contractor connections years before graduation. The program’s architects framed the clearance backlog as a cost problem for companies, not just an inconvenience for candidates.
Large primes have pursued this model aggressively for years. Lockheed Martin, for instance, runs formal campus recruitment programs at dozens of universities, and one company executive has acknowledged publicly that as many as 35% of its engineering workforce could retire within a few years, making university pipelines a structural necessity.
For mid-tier contractors like HX5, the resource calculus is different. Sponsoring seven-figure university research grants or staging elaborate campus recruitment events is not realistic at a firm of roughly 1,000 employees. The model Margarita Howard describes is leaner: direct research collaboration that generates technology insight and surface-area with emerging talent simultaneously. Both outputs from a single investment.
The goal is to extend the range of candidates HX5 can evaluate beyond the shrinking pool of pre-cleared, mission-experienced veterans of government programs and bring the company closer to technologies that will eventually define what those programs require.